On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Jared Mauch <jared@puck.nether.net> wrote:
On Jan 26, 2011, at 8:33 PM, Owen DeLong wrote: I expect that in ~3 years, we will see dual-stack and /64's handed out in conjunction with an IPv4 address as "common". The ipv6 zealots talking about anything but a /64 for >end-site are talking about a "business class" service.
No... they are not.. the /56 assignments are for all types of end sites, whether business or not. What makes a service "business class" or not has nothing directly to do with the number of IP addresses used. The only reason more IP addresses available was associated with higher classes of service in IPv4, and different end sites had different sizes of assignments, was because IP addresses were so scarce, and costly. Business class connections provide data rates suitable for larger networks, or generally come with SLAs; committed data rates, or assurances of reliability. The IP addressing needed for hosts is independent of the class of service. Under IPv6; it should be possible to upgrade service levels, or add networks, with no renumbering, or extra work required by the ISP to allocate more subnets. The /48 end-site assignments help future proof the LAN and help avoid the need to ever renumber to add subnets or to add discontinuous ones (aside from changing ISPs).
Even with my static IPs at home, I have no need for more than a single /64 to be used in my wildest dreams. I could live with ~256 ips for the future. I consider my tech density "above-average".
98% of home users could probably live with _one_ IP address behind a NAT router; heck, most of them are doing just that with IPv4. Heck... most could probably live with 8 TCP port numbers and 8 UDP port numbers. What a waste of bits to give residential users 16-bit port numbers. Transition to IPv6 is not about what users can "live with" using current technology. The /48 end site assignments is supposed to provide opportunity for new technologies to be developed and provide useful innovations. Your wildest dreams are pretty limited, if you can't think of any way the additional subnets can be useful. Security and logical division are a few ideas. You might not care to do that now... but in 20 years, when you have 100000 smart chip / IP-based home automation enabled devices on your LAN. Subnetting starts to look more attractive; especially if common routers get the ability to do it automatically, and implement some passive isolation-based security mechanisms.
- Jared -JH